July 3: Eat It Well, Benjamin Franklin, Wild Turkeys

Santiago strikes hard at the fish . . . 

He let the line slip through his fingers while he reached down with his left hand and made fast the free end of the two reserve coils to the loop of the two reserve coils of the next line. Now he was ready. He had three forty-fathom coils of line in reserve now, as well as the coil he was using.

"Eat it a little more," he said. "Eat it well."

Eat it so that the point of the hook goes into your heart and kills you, he thought. Come up easy and let me put the harpoon into you. All right. Are you ready? Have you been long enough at table?

"Now!" he said aloud and struck hard with both hands, gained a yard of line and then struck again and again, swinging with each arm alternately on the cord with all the strength of his arms and the pivoted weight of his body.

On my way to play for a church service this morning, I passed two fat wild turkeys on the side of the road.  They moved slowly, without fear, almost like royalty.  I've been thinking about those turkeys all day.

Benjamin Franklin, after the bald eagle was chosen as the national bird, wrote in a letter to his daughter, "For my own part I wish the bald eagle had not been chosen as the representative of our country. He is a bird of bad moral character. He does not get his living honestly. You may have seen him perched on some dead tree, where, too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the labour of the fishing hawk; and when that diligent bird has at length taken a fish, and is bearing it to his nest for the support of his mate and young ones, the bald eagle pursues him, and takes it from him. . . . the turkey is in comparison a much more respectable bird, and withal a true original native of America."

In a lot of ways, Santiago is a lot like that turkey that Franklin praises here.  Dependable and patient.  Not cunning and violent, but respectable.  The old man is the same, rowing out on the ocean every day, casting his lines, and waiting for luck to swim up and bite his hook.

A long time ago, I was driving along another highway with a friend, and we saw a flock of wild turkeys on the side of the road.  My friend told me that seeing a wild turkey was a sign of coming wealth and prosperity.  That happened over 15 years ago, and I'm still waiting for that promised turkey payday.  Still working several jobs to pay my bills.

Today, I played keyboard/organ for two different church services.  Went grocery shopping.  Spent a couple hours mowing my lawn.  Took a short nap.  Then went for a walk with my wife and son to a new ice cream store that just opened in my hometown.  My wife got butterscotch ice cream.  My son chose a double scoop of root beer float.  And I got a single of peach.  On our way home, we stopped by the home of one of our best friends, sat on her front porch, and visited with her and her family visiting from Louisiana.  

I am a little exhausted right now, but I feel rich.  Not in terms of money in my pocket or bank account.  But I've got a pretty good life.  I have a roof over my head.  My family is healthy and happy.  The work that I do is fulfilling.  My lawn is cut.  And I got to share an ice cream moment with people I love tonight.

Saint Marty would call that prosperity.

September 12: Red Cow, WHAMMO!, Where Poetry Lives

Thomas Merton as a freshman at Cambridge . . .

Perhaps to you the atmosphere of Cambridge is neither dark nor sinister. Perhaps you were never there except in May. You never saw anything but the thin Spring sun half veiled in the mists and blossoms of the gardens along the Backs, smiling on the lavender bricks and stones of Trinity and St. John’s, or my own college, Clare. 

I am even willing to admit that some people might live there for three years, or even a lifetime, so protected that they never sense the sweet stench of corruption that is all around them—the keen, thin scent of decay that pervades everything and accuses with a terrible accusation the superficial youthfulness, the abounding undergraduate noise that fills those ancient buildings. But for me, with my blind appetites, it was impossible that I should not rush in and take a huge bite of this rotten fruit. The bitter taste is still with me after not a few years. 

My freshman year went by very fast. It was a dizzy business that began in the dark, brief afternoons of the English autumn and ended after a short series of long summer evenings on the river. All those days and nights were without romance, horrible. They could not help being everything that I did not want them to be. 

I was breaking my neck trying to get everything out of life that you think you can get out of it when you are eighteen. And I ran with a pack of hearties who wore multicolored scarves around their necks and who would have barked all night long in the echoing shadows of the Petty Cury if they had not been forced to go home to bed at a certain time. 

At first it was confusing. It took me a month or two to find my level in this cloudy semi-liquid medium in whose dregs I was ultimately destined to settle. There were my friends from Oakham. At first we clung together for protection, and used to spend much time in one another’s rooms, although Andrew’s digs were far away in the wilds beyond Addenbrooke’s hospital. To get there I cycled through a mysterious world of new buildings dedicated to chemistry, and at the end of the journey drank tea and played St. Louis Blues on the piano. Dickens was much nearer. He was around the corner from my lodgings. You traveled through two or three courts of St. John’s College and crossed the river. He was in the so-called New Building. His room directly overlooked the river and he and I and Andrew would eat breakfast there and throw bits of toast to the ducks while he told us all about Pavlov and conditioned reflexes. 

As the year went on I drifted apart from them, especially from Andrew who ended up as the leading man in the Footlights show that year. He was something of a singer. My crowd had no interest in singing and a certain amount of contempt, indeed, for the Footlights and all that it represented. I remember that I almost made friends with one or two serious and somewhat complicated young men who were reading modern languages with me and belonged to my own college, but their reticences bored me. And they, in their turn, were rather shocked by the two-handed heartiness with which I was grabbing at life. 

In the room underneath mine, in my lodgings, was a round red-faced Yorkshireman who was a pacifist. He too was full of reticences. But on Armistice Day he got into some kind of a demonstration and all the rugger players and oarsmen threw eggs at him. I knew nothing about it until I saw the pictures in the evening paper. 

I would not have been interested in making friends with him either—he was too tame and shy. But in any case the landlord took to coming into my room and calumniating the poor man while I listened patiently, knowing of no way to shut him up. Before the end of the year the landlord was much more disgusted with me than with any lodger he had ever had before or, probably, since. 

I think it was after Armistice Day, when I had finally become acquainted with some two hundred different people, that I drifted into the crowd that had been gravitating around the nether pole of Cambridge life. 

We were the ones who made all the noise when there was a “bump supper.” We lived in the Lion Inn. We fought our way in and out of the “Red Cow.”

I've been teaching rooms full of college Mertons for over 25 years.  What Merton describes here isn't unique.  In fact, I would say it's pretty typical for 18- and 19- and 20-somethings.  They don't know who they are, what they are, sometimes where they are.  They are told on a daily basis that they're adults and need to behave as such.  Yet, their prefrontal cortexes are still in that weird state of adolescent playdough, being shaped and reshaped, over and over, by their experiences.  In the morning they wake up as bowls and then--WHAMMO!--they're flattened into plates by afternoon.

Of course, that happens to adults, as well.  You wake up, get dressed, go to the office where you've worked for the last 20 years, and--WHAMMO!--your entire department is being outsourced.  Or, you wake up happily married, go to work, and when you get back home--WHAMMO!--your spouse is gone.  There are no guarantees for stability or happiness in life.  Benjamin Franklin's little nugget of wisdom still applies:  ". . . in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes."  One of my many therapists with whom I've worked once told me, "Change is inevitable."  She was right.

I'm sure everyone reading this post will agree that 2020 has been a WHAMMO! year.  So much that I took for granted has vanished.  Going to a movie theater.  Walking into a classroom.  Eating out at a restaurant.  The simplest acts of living in 2019 have been transformed into occasions of possible deadly exposure in 2020.  Two words that will probably be used, over and over, in history books about this time are "isolation" and "distance."  People have been forced to become islands by the pandemic.

I have never been a fan of WHAMMO!  In fact, I would say that I've spent a good portion of my life running from WHAMMO!  I'm a creature of habit.  I've said so many times in this blog.  As a writer, this character trait helps me.  Having a writing routine makes it easier for me to slip deeper and quicker into the place where poetry lives.

Some people might accuse me of wanting a boring life.  That's not true.  I want a life where the people I cherish most are happy and healthy and safe.  I want a life where love and trust aren't distant stars, but twin suns in my orbit.  I want my daughter to realize that she astounds me constantly with her boundless compassion.  I want my son to understand that this world is a better place because he's in it.  I want my wife to know that I've given her my best self, every day, since we've been together.  No WHAMMO! can take any of those things away.

So, yes, Mr. Franklin, death and taxes are certainties.  But I also know I can count on my daughter to hug me every night before she goes to bed.  That my son can't fall asleep until I sit on the edge of his mattress and pray with him.  And that, in the dark tonight, before I close my eyes, I will look at my wife's sleeping face and remember the first time I kissed her.

For all those certain miracles, Saint Marty gives thanks.

Check out my new podcast--Confessions of Saint Marty:

Confessions of Saint Marty podcast

September 8: That's His Problem, List Making. Johnny Cash

A little exchange between Ford and Zaphod . . .

"What did he say?" whispered Ford in astonishment.

"He said it isn't easy being a cop."

"Well, surely that's his problem, isn't it?"

"I'd have thought so."

Welcome to my Sunday, which has not gone exactly as I had planned.  Now it is your turn to say, "Well, surely that's your problem, isn't it?"  Yes.  Yes, it is.

I am a list-maker.  Every morning, I sit down to write out my to-dos.  This morning's list was not very extensive, but, unlike yesterday (when I finished everything on my list), I have accomplished next to nothing today.  In fact, this blog post is the last thing that I will be able to check off.

You may think that sounds more than a little bit anal retentive.  I like to think of myself as simply organized.  It's the way I keep myself from going insane every day.  My daughter has inherited my penchant for lists.  Friday night, as we were eating supper together, she and I actually shared our list-making strategies and the satisfaction we feel when we can actually cross off every item on our daily lists.  My wife listened to us, shook her head, and said, "My God, she is her father's daughter."

So, today, I had six things to accomplish.  I was only able to get to four of them.  The rest will be moved forward to tomorrow's list.  I hate going to bed, knowing that there are already items that need my attention the next day.  However, I cannot avoid it this evening.

If you, like my daughter and I, suffer from this list affliction, take heart.  You are not alone.  In fact, you're in pretty good company.  Writer Umberto Eco once said, "The list is the origin of culture.  Wherever you look in cultural history, you will find lists."  Benjamin Franklin was the father of to-do lists, including a 13-week plan to "practice virtues such as cleanliness" and temperance.  Johnny Cash's daily to-do list was pretty basic:

1. Not smoke.
2. Kiss June.
3. Not kiss anyone else.
4. Cough.
5. Pee.
6. Eat.
7. Not eat too much.
8. Worry.
9. Go see Mama.
10. Practice piano.

Johnny Cash did pretty well for himself.  (By the way, Cash ended that list with a note to himself to "not write notes.")

I don't know if I've made my case for the importance of list-making.

Saint Marty will have to make a list to try and figure that out.

June 30: Dentarthurdent, Mystery and Myth, All the Wonder Things

Arthur is trying to unravel the mystery of the old man he has just met on the surface of Magrathea, which itself, up until a couple chapters ago, was a myth--like the Golden Fleece or the city of Troy . . .

Arthur, a regular Guardian reader, was deeply shocked at this.

"That's a pretty unpleasant way to behave, isn't it?"

"Is it?" asked the old man mildly.  "I'm sorry, I'm a bit out of touch."

He pointed down into the crater.

"Is that robot yours?" he said.

"No," came a thin metallic voice from the crater.  "I'm mine."

"If you'd call it a robot," muttered Arthur.  "It's more a sort of electronic sulking machine."

"Bring it," said the old ma.  Arthur was quite surprised to hear a note of decision suddenly present in the old man's voice.  He called to Marvin, who crawled up the slope making a big show of being lame, which he wasn't.

"On second thought," said the old man, "leave it here.  You must come with me.  Great things are afoot."  He turned toward his craft which, though no apparent signal had been given, now drifted quietly toward them through the dark.

Arthur looked down at Marvin, who now made an equally big show of turning round laboriously and trudging off down into the crater again, muttering sour nothings to himself.

"Come," called the old man, "come now or you will be late."

"Late/" said Arthur.  "What for?"

"What is your name, human?"

"Dent.  Arthur Dent," said Arthur.

"Late, is in the late Dentarthurdent," said the old man, sternly.  "It's a sort of threat, you see."  Another wistful look came into his tired old eyes.  "I've never been very good at them myself, but I'm told they can be very effective."

Arthur blinked at him.

"What an extraordinary person," he muttered to himself.

"I beg your pardon?" said the old man.

"Oh, nothing, I'm sorry," said Arthur in embarrassment.  "All right, where do we go?"

"In my aircar," said the old man, motioning Arthur to get into the craft which had settled silently next to them.  "We are going deep into the bowels of the planet where even now our race is being revived from its five-million-year slumber.  Magrathea awakes."

Arthur shivered involuntarily as he seated himself next to the old man.  The strangeness of it, the silent bobbing movement of the craft as it soared into the night sky, quite unsettled him.

He looked at the old man, his face illuminated by the dull glow of tiny lights on the instrument panel.

"Excuse me," he said to him, "what is your name, by the way?"

"My name?" said the old man, and the same distant sadness came into his face again.  He paused.  "My name," he said, "is Slartibartfast."

Arthur practically choked.

"I beg your pardon?" he spluttered.

"Slartibartfast," repeated the old man quietly.

"Slartibartfast?"

The old man looked at him gravely.

"I said it wasn't important," he said.

The aircar sailed through the night.

The old man could be the last survivor of Magrathea or Atlantis.  He could be Methuselah or Noah.  A resident of Shangri-La or Brigadoon.  He may be a man or a god or a demon or a robot.  At this point, Arthur isn't sure who or what he is dealing with.  It's all mystery and myth.

As I've said before in this blog, I'm fine living with negative capability, to borrow from John Keats.  Living with uncertainty is part of the human condition.  That pretty much describes my whole life.  Especially these last couple months, I'm never sure when I wake up what the day will bring me.  Ever.

Now, I would be happier living in certainty, but that's not a realistic goal.  Benjamin Franklin said, "In this world, nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes."  However, even that quote is draped in mystery, for it may have been Daniel Defoe or Christopher Bullock who first uttered it more than 60 years before Franklin, making one of the Founding Fathers of the United States a plagiarist.

We all live in negative capability.  There are no guarantees when you wake up in the morning that you will come home at night.  No guarantees that you will keep your job or your wife or your children.   I think that everyone has to fool themselves every day in order to face life.  For instance, when I got out of bed today, it was with the understanding that I would be going to church and then spending the afternoon mowing the lawn at my mother's house.  Those were my plans.

Now, those plans kind of panned out.  I did worship with my wife, and then I did spend a couple hours pushing the lawnmower at my mother's.  However, it could have easily gone in another direction.  My car could have been sideswiped in the parking lot at McDonald's as I was picking up breakfast.  The lawnmower could have refused to start.  It could have rained.  None of those things happened.

Today, my wife is struggling with her bipolar disorder.  She hasn't been sleeping well recently.  That, in itself, is not cause for major concern.  However, she's also been unable to be restful at home, suffers from racing thoughts.  (She told me this afternoon, "I feel like I'm jumping out of my skin.")  She also had a pretty bad episode of depression on Thursday evening.

All of these things point toward a problem that needs to be addressed with her doctor.  My wife has already called her doctor's office once.  She's going to call again tomorrow.  In the mean time, she didn't go to work today.  Instead, she stayed home and slept.  (She only got three hours of sleep, if that, last night.)

Bipolar is a mysterious disorder.  It can be completely controlled for years with a certain medication, and then, one day, that medication can stop working properly, with serious results.  My wife and I have been through some difficult times with her mental illness.  I remember nights where my wife would jump in our car and disappear to Walmart to go grocery shopping at 3 a.m.  She would start home improvement projects that went unfinished.  One weekend, we drove to Wisconsin and bought a brand new minivan.  (Several months later, we had to trade in the minivan for a car we could actually afford.)

So, you see, I have some experience with myth, mystery, and negative capability.  I know that a day can turn from mundane to insane very quickly.  I also know that I can't do anything to control the negative capabilities of my life.  This may sound very twelve-steppish, but I have come to accept very recently that I am powerless.  I can't control the weather.  I can't control my wife's mental illness.  I can't control what happens in the Star Wars franchise.  (If I could have, Han Solo would still be alive.)

What can I do in the face of mystery?  I can confront it when it happens.  Deal with it.  Move on.  I certainly can't live my life trying to avoid it.  If I did that, I wouldn't ever get out of bed.  I'd just live my life in fear of the unknown.  And I would miss all the wonderful things God sends my way.  A daughter graduating from high school  A son winning a poetry contest.  A dinner of lobster ravioli.  A evening walk with my wife, holding her hand, talking about tomorrow and the next day and the next.

Yes, the future is full of myth and mystery and unknowns. 

But it also contains hope, and that (along with a little bit of chocolate and a good book) makes Marty a happy saint.

August 28: The Carpenter, Renaissance Man, ADHD

Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high abstracted man alone; and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. But from the same point, take mankind in mass, and for the most part, they seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both contemporary and hereditary. But most humble though he was, and far from furnishing an example of the high, humane abstraction; the Pequod's carpenter was no duplicate; hence, he now comes in person on this stage.

Like all sea-going ship carpenters, and more especially those belonging to whaling vessels, he was, to a certain off-hand, practical extent, alike experienced in numerous trades and callings collateral to his own; the carpenter's pursuit being the ancient and outbranching trunk of all those numerous handicrafts which more or less have to do with wood as an auxiliary material. But, besides the application to him of the generic remark above, this carpenter of the Pequod was singularly efficient in those thousand nameless mechanical emergencies continually recurring in a large ship, upon a three or four years' voyage, in uncivilized and far-distant seas. For not to speak of his readiness in ordinary duties:- repairing stove boats, sprung spars, reforming the shape of clumsy-bladed oars, inserting bull's eyes in the deck, or new tree-nails in the side planks, and other miscellaneous matters more directly pertaining to his special business; he was moreover unhesitatingly expert in all manner of conflicting aptitudes, both useful and capricious.

The one grand stage where he enacted all his various parts so manifold, was his vice-bench; a long rude ponderous table furnished with several vices, of different sizes, and both of iron and of wood. At all times except when whales were alongside, this bench was securely lashed athwartships against the rear of the Try-works.

A belaying pin is found too large to be easily inserted into its hole: the carpenter claps it into one of his ever ready vices, and straightway files it smaller. A lost landbird of strange plumage strays on board, and is made a captive: out of clean shaved rods of right-whale bone, and cross-beams of sperm whale ivory, the carpenter makes a pagoda-looking cage for it. An oarsmen sprains his wrist: the carpenter concocts a soothing lotion. Stubb longed for vermillion stars to be painted upon the blade of his every oar; screwing each oar in his big vice of wood, the carpenter symmetrically supplies the constellation. A sailor takes a fancy to wear shark-bone ear-rings: the carpenter drills his ears.  Another has the toothache: the carpenter out pincers, and clapping one hand upon his bench bids him be seated there; but the poor fellow unmanageably winces under the unconcluded operation; whirling round the handle of his wooden vice, the carpenter signs him to clap his jaw in that, if he would have him draw the tooth.

Thus, this carpenter was prepared at all points, and alike indifferent and without respect in all. Teeth he accounted bits of ivory; heads he deemed but top-blocks; men themselves he lightly held for capstans. But while now upon so wide a field thus variously accomplished and with such liveliness of expertness in him, too; all this would seem to argue some uncommon vivacity of intelligence. But not precisely so. For nothing was this man more remarkable, than for a certain impersonal stolidity as it were; impersonal, I say; for it so shaded off into the surrounding infinite of things, that it seemed one with the general stolidity discernible in the whole visible world; which while pauselessly active in uncounted modes, still eternally holds its peace, and ignores you, though you dig foundations for cathedrals. Yet was this half-horrible stolidity in him, involving, too, as it appeared, an all-ramifying heartlessness;- yet was it oddly dashed at times, with an old, crutch-like, antediluvian, wheezing humorousness, not unstreaked now and then with a certain grizzled wittiness; such as might have served to pass the time during the midnight watch on the bearded forecastle of Noah's ark. Was it that this old carpenter had been a life-long wanderer, whose much rolling, to and fro, not only had gathered no moss; but what is more, had rubbed off whatever small outward clingings might have originally pertained to him? He was a stript abstract; an unfractioned integral; uncompromised as a new-born babe; living without premeditated reference to this world or the next. You might almost say, that this strange uncompromisedness in him involved a sort of unintelligence; for in his numerous trades, he did not seem to work so much by reason or by instinct, or simply because he had been tutored to it, or by any intermixture of all these, even or uneven; but merely by kind of deaf and dumb, spontaneous literal process. He was a pure manipulater; his brain, if he had ever had one, must have early oozed along into the muscles of his fingers. He was like one of those unreasoning but still highly useful, multum in parvo, Sheffield contrivances, assuming the exterior- though a little swelled- of a common pocket knife; but containing, not only blades of various sizes, but also screw-drivers, cork-screws, tweezers, awls, pens, rulers, nail-filers, countersinkers. So, if his superiors wanted to use the carpenter for a screw-driver, all they had to do was to open that part of him, and the screw was fast: or if for tweezers, take him up by the legs, and there they were.

Yet, as previously hinted, this omnitooled, open-and-shut carpenter, was, after all, no mere machine of an automaton. If he did not have a common soul in him, he had a subtle something that somehow anomalously did its duty. What that was, whether essence of quicksilver, or a few drops of hartshorn, there is no telling. But there it was; and there it had abided for now some sixty years or more. And this it was, this same unaccountable, cunning life-principle in him; this it was, that kept him a great part of the time soliloquizing; but only like an unreasoning wheel, which also hummingly soliloquizes; or rather, his body was a sentry-box and this soliloquizer on guard there, and talking all the time to keep himself awake.

Melville fairly canonizes the carpenter in this chapter, making him a descendant of Noah, no less.  The carpenter shaves wood and bone.  Engraves oars.  Pierces ears.  Extracts rotting teeth.  It seems that the carpenter is the jack-of-all-things on the Pequod.  Dentist, beautician, artist, craftsman.  And, for Captain Ahab, a leg-carver.

Today, I spoke with a person I hadn't seen in many years.  He asked me if I was still into theater, because that's how he knew me in the past.  I told him that I hadn't done theater in many years.  "Well, what are you doing now?" he asked.

I went on to list my current occupations:  English professor, healthcare worker, church organist, musician, poet, writer, husband, father, Bigfoot bard, laureate, editor, blogger, radio show performer and host . . . He stopped me after a minute or so.

"Wow," he said.  "You're quite the Renaissance man."

I'm not telling you this story to brag.  Ever since I was young, I've always thought myself to be really unfocused.  I've bounced from one interest to another.  At various times as an adolescent, I said I wanted to be a writer, movie director, music composer, novelist, screenwriter, playwright, actor, teacher.  Although I was never diagnosed as a child, I see a lot of myself in my son, who has been diagnosed with ADHD.  My son takes medication to help him focus.  I, on the other hand, was enrolled in piano lessons by my mother.  Which did the trick.

Piano made me sit down.  Calm down.  Focus for an hour or so.  It calmed my restless mind for a while and gave the members of my family a little bit of a break from the dervish of my day.  As I grew up, my many interests served me well.  I graduated from college with a major in English and minors in math and computer science.  I earned a Master's in fiction writing and an MFA in poetry.

Perhaps Renaissance men/women simply had ADHD.  Leonardo da Vinci.  Michelangelo.  Cicero.  Galileo.  Thomas Jefferson.  Isaac Newton.  Perhaps they all lacked the ability to focus for long periods of time.  Maybe my Bigfoot book of poems will be my Sistine Chapel or Mona Lisa.

Hmmmm.  I've always wanted to try my hand at painting.

Saint Marty is thankful this evening for poetry and painting and music and math and . . .